MY second wish was to make it an aunt’s house. For when I had reached my quiet resigned thirties I liked aunthood the best of all the relationships that were open to me. Even Flaubert had a niece, and at the time when I bought my house I had two nephews and five nieces.
Most children treated me as if I belonged to their world rather than to the grown-up world, and I was flattered by this great compliment. It was partly because of my small size. I had never grown any taller than a ten-year-old child and therefore children could never believe that I really was a grownup. At regular intervals my nieces and nephews would ask me again if I was ever going to grow any taller, if I was really and truly a grownup, and if I would ever be able to marry anybody. Ranie and Kitty and Ann, the three little sisters in a row who were my sister Lurana’s children, were the ones who used to talk to me the most intimately about everything almost from the moment they were born. They were always wondering and talking most fantastically about such things as marrying and dying and God. They were not high-brow little girls. They all three quite lackadaisically took it for granted that they would become movie stars a little later on, but in spite of this frivolous aim they spent most of their own private time much less frivolously than most grownups do, in talking about the only things that are really important. When these three asked me questions about myself and the shape of my body they spoke of it with a kind of awe, as if they thought there was something wonderful about it—as if my difference made me more rare and precious than ordinary, properly made people. Yet in spite of this attitude they always spoke about it with a careful tenderness as if they were afraid they might hurt me; and whenever they talked about me and my deformity they would surround me and close in around me as if they wanted to protect me from something outside. For of course they had heard grown-up people and other children of the kind who echo grown-up people’s ideas speak of me in a very different way. They knew that the general grown-up idea was decidedly not that something rare and wonderful had happened to me. But children, if they are let alone, have their own strong and independent sense of values. They seem to value particularly anything which has escaped from the conventional pattern of grown-upness. And I had done this most conspicuously, although involuntarily. I always felt myself especially honored because the thing which seemed a misfortune in the grown-up world made me belong near the top in their independent, upside-down, antigrown-up scale of values.
The conversations between us concerning my deformity always occurred when we were alone, never before any parents or other grownups. Alas! If any of the parents had happened to come in during our conversations—my sister or my brothers—they would have been, like any other sensitive, well-bred people, horribly embarrassed. Because of the subject which had been so carefully repressed all of our lives they would not have been able to meet my glance without pain and confusion, if they had come in and found the children talking easily about it with me. The children’s naturalness, graced with so much love and imagination and delicacy, was a wonderful and a new experience to me. They unlocked a lifelong barrier in me, and so they made me feel more at home and more at ease in their world than I had ever felt in the world of grownups, where this problem had been excluded from every conversation or, if by some awkward accident it did protrude above the surface, was met with dreadful embarrassment and a quick changing of the subject. This evasion was to me mysterious and terrible and baffling. I understood that my mother could never speak of it, and I understood that my brothers and my sister could not speak of it. And I understood that perhaps I could not have borne it if they had spoken of it when we were growing up. But the children, when they arrived on the scene, created a new dimension in which they and I could speak of it easily. For us it was so simple. I felt as if I had been a person in a fairy tale who had been locked up all my life in a lonely hut in a forest, and then one day children had come to play around my hut, and playing, they had found a key in the grass and just by chance they had tried the key in the door of the hut, and had unlocked the door and found me. They had gaily welcomed me and invited me to come out of my prison and play with them.
Earlier in my career I had had a critical experience which for a little while had threatened to make me feel that children were my worst enemies. When I made my first appearance in the perpendicular world, at sixteen or seventeen years of age, after spending most of my life in a secluded and horizontal situation, I began to walk out alone in the streets of our town for the first time; and I found then that whenever I had to pass three or four children together on the sidewalk, if I happened to be alone, they would shout at me, and call me by the terrible name which I had heard long ago describing the little locksmith. Sometimes they even ran after me, shouting and jeering. This was something I didn’t know how to face, and it seemed as if I couldn’t bear it. In the horizontal and protected place I had hitherto occupied inside the shelter of our home I had always been interested in younger children. My little sister Lury and her friends were always playing around my bed. I used to watch them and listen to their talk, and I never grew tired of their society. They posed for me while I drew pictures of them, and they were always asking me to make paper dolls for them, which I did for hours at a time. And between me and Fergus and Warren and their friends who came to play with us there never was any bad temper or quarreling that I can remember, and therefore I was completely unprepared for hostility from anyone, and especially from children, when I went out into the world, and least of all for those terrible and apparently automatic taunts and jeers.
For a while those encounters in the street filled me with a cold dread of all unknown children. My natural friends seemed to have become my natural enemies. I felt horribly exposed whenever I walked out of the house. And I got a sort of mariner’s habit of scanning the horizon for my enemies and changing my course in plenty of time to avoid meeting them, especially the little idle groups of three or four which were always the most menacing. I could sometimes get safely past one child who was all alone. But no matter how cautious I was it was impossible to avoid meeting children. They would pop up out of a side street when I thought I was perfectly safe. They would suddenly come out of a yard or a front door.
This new danger contrasted strangely with all my past experience. It appeared that in the outside world I was seen very differently from the way I was seen at home. Among my family I was still the treasured, protected person of extraordinary importance, yet whenever I went out alone I was liable to become at any moment an object of contempt and mockery. Whenever the moment came and I had to walk past children, who were shouting at me, I used to try to seal myself up, get far inside myself, and close all my passages of communication so that their cries could not penetrate me and hurt me. For the reason why the children’s cries could hurt me so was because I knew they were true. The children were perfectly right about me. They were the only people who were really honest with me. They made me share with them a horrible disgraceful secret concerning me which my family were too refined to understand. I felt that I had to protect my family from this secret disgrace of mine. If they ever should find out that I was being mocked at and humiliated on the street their horror would somehow make it even worse and more humiliating for me.
One day I suddenly realized that I had become so self-conscious and afraid of all strange children that, like animals, they knew I was afraid, so that even the mildest and most amiable of them were automatically prompted to derision by my own shrinking and dread. As soon as this dawned upon me I began to try to charm them like a lion trainer.
By main force I began to lift the focus of my own attention, and consequently theirs too, off myself and place it gently but firmly upon them instead. When they glanced up as I approached along the sidewalk they found me looking with interest into their own faces, as if I had noticed something quite astonishing and amusing in them. If they stared back without smiling I still managed to compel myself to look into their faces invitingly while I still pretended to be unperturbed and lightly amused.
This method worked on them, and it worked on me. For I discovered that it was ridiculously easy to bend their soft and pliable attention back upon themselves, and then to make them unconsciously begin to feel a pleasant warmth being shed upon them, something even desirable and fascinating. At first it was only by a most desperate effort of imagination that I managed to summon up this ray of love and deep interest and direct it upon my enemies; but as soon as I saw that it worked my technique improved, and the charm worked better all the time until it suddenly merged into naturalness and was no longer a charm but the expression of real feeling. After that there was no fear or distrust left in me, and no child ever shouted at me again or, if any did, I didn’t hear or know it.
After that, wherever I went, in subways or trains, or jolting through our county on the trolley cars of that period, I would always become fascinated by some child or other who was sitting near me. Often there would be a workman sitting opposite me wearing black greasy clothes and with a haggard tired face, and his wife, equally haggard and worn, and without a sign left on either of their faces of the freshness of their youth. And nestling between them there would be a child as beautiful as a little rose. The child would be tired and half asleep and dressed in poor cheap clothes, but its drooping dreaming face, its soft eyelids and heavy lashes and its miraculous fairness, its little chin and neck and voluptuous, unconscious hands falling over its father’s or mother’s shabby sleeve, could touch me with an overwhelming feeling of the beauty and pathos of life. Wherever I went, after this time, I always noticed them everywhere—children, who roused such feeling in me. I know that I used to stare at them in a kind of trance. They seemed to me the only beautiful human beings, scattered about like flowers in the midst of ugly, corrupted, grown people. They seemed to me like unearthly things, belonging to a world of perfection and innocence like William Blake’s world. Unlike the race of grown-up people, children, it seemed to me, could never under any circumstances be ordinary or commonplace.
When I was young I could not bear to have anyone make life seem commonplace, and yet that was the thing that nearly all the middle-aged and old people did. I could not bear to hear droning middle-aged women tell about their stomachs and the gas that was or had been on their stomachs and about their constipated bowels. It was even worse when they talked about other subjects because they spoke of such things as childbirth and death in the same familiar and gossipy tone in which they talked about their stomachs and bowels. Such an absence of awe toward these miraculous things struck me when I was young as a horrible blasphemy against life. I could not endure it. I was shocked not only by their tone but by all the subjects which most of the old people spent their time thinking and worrying about—these subjects were not love and forgiveness and death and night and the stars, but sinks that had to be cleaned, the stock market, and that mysterious important monster whose name was Business, and whose health had to be inquired about and reported upon every day, as if he were a terrible old god whose good humor could make us all happy and whose bad days could plunge us into gloom. I despised the old people for allowing the mood of their immortal souls to be dependent on the whims of this monster. I said to myself that I would never submit to it.
I turned to children because they were free of all this corruption. They were the only ones who were not degraded by responsibility and practical calculations. They were the only ones who had any true naturalness, innocence, abandon.
Therefore when the new generation made its debut in our family, in the person of my elder brother’s Tony with his wide-apart blue eyes and his little solemn questing spirit, I for one welcomed him with almost painful awe and tenderness. I felt that my new status of maiden aunt was the thing I had been waiting for, and the thing that would satisfy me. Of all human relationships aunthood seemed to be the one I was born for.
No, not born for. Nobody is really born to be a maiden aunt. In order to develop into a good maiden aunt I think you have to begin life like anybody else, born for a fine destiny full of hope and passion. Then you must have encountered some physical injury, heartbreak, or fatal misunderstanding which made it seem necessary to withdraw your hope and hide your passion and stand aside in the wings and watch the others who have been given real parts in the play.
These discarded people make the best, the only true and valuable maiden aunts. Their unspent love and the compensating talent, which they so often possess whether they develop it or not, can do certain things for children which no good mother ought to be able to do, since it happens that a good aunt makes a very bad mother, and a good mother could not possibly be a good mother if she had the wild erratic qualities which belong to the good maiden aunt.
Everybody knows that a good mother gives her children a feeling of trust and stability. She is their earth. She is the one they can count on for the things that matter most of all. She is their food and their bed and the extra blanket when it grows cold in the night; she is their warmth and their health and their shelter, she is the one they want to be near when they cry. She is the only person in the whole world or in a whole lifetime who can be these things to her children. There is no substitute for her. Somehow even her clothes feel different to her children’s hands from anybody else’s clothes. Only to touch her skirt or her collar or her sleeve makes a troubled child feel better. And often when a child wants her this is all that a mother has time to give. She is always moving. She has so many things to do. She can’t sit down in a chair and talk nonsense right in the middle of a busy day. Sometimes a child has a great urge to talk what its mother calls nonsense. Sometimes even a child’s worry about death and about the beginning and the end of the universe seems like nonsense to the busy mother when she knows by taking one quick animal sniff of him that there is nothing wrong with him.
This is where the good maiden aunt comes in. The aunt should have no binding domestic occupation. She should have nothing that could be called a domestic tie except the habit of being a carefree visitor in the houses where her nieces and nephews live. Or she may have the occupation of possessing a house of her own which is devoted primarily to receiving visits from her nephews and nieces and where there is somebody else to attend to all domestic matters.
The good maiden aunt is the one who is as free and nonsensical (and sad, at times) as the children are themselves, and who will never tire of paying attention to anything they may do or say. She is the one grown-up person in their acquaintance who will never look at a clock and tell them to hurry up because it is time for them to get ready. She would rather let them be two hours late to a dressmaker and three hours late to school than ever say this to them. Yet their mother could not possibly be like that, and the children could not bear it if she were. The good aunt has the same uncorrupted cosmic sense of leisure that the children have, and together they carry on conversations and enterprises which haven’t any end. They lie on the floor and write and draw pictures. They make up songs, they make up games, they look at things through a microscope, they make things with scissors out of colored paper. There is no limit to what they may think of or invent. They discover wonders and talk about subjects that the mothers and fathers haven’t any idea of.
The only occupation a good aunt may have apart from the children is something irregular; like being a painter or a story writer or an astronomer. Children can heartily sympathize with and approve of an aunt’s doing this kind of work because they can see some sense in it themselves, and they can often be a great help to her in it. But even if the aunt never does any work seriously enough to become known in the outside world she must have come near enough to being an artist or an astronomer or a dancer to know how it feels to want to be one, or to want to belong to any other of the irregular, creative professions, so that she will recognize any such talent if it appears in her nephews or nieces. For some reason or other this kind of an aunt, especially if she never really does anything herself but remembers all her life the feeling of having wanted to, is almost sure to have at least one niece or nephew who shows signs of feeling the same thing. When this happens all the buried passion and unused strength of the lost artist in the aunt gathers itself up in her in one fierce purpose to help the unconscious waking artist or scholar or scientist in the child. The aunt can be very quiet about it, and nobody will know that she has this fierce purpose in her; but she will be continually on the watch and, without anybody noticing particularly, she will not miss many opportunities to supply whatever the child may need to keep the talent alive and growing in him.
The aunt will save her public fierceness for the moment of conflict which is bound to come—when the child grows older and announces his decision to his parents—his decision to be an artist, or a writer, astronomer, or dancer, or whatever it may be, instead of following the conventional career approved of by his parents. On that day the really good maiden aunt will show that she hasn’t lived her inconspicuous frustrated life in vain. She will burst out in a great robust defiance of convention and in a championship of the artist which is quite equal in fierceness to the fabulous fierceness of the maternal instinct. I feel sure that behind many of the great accomplishments in the arts and sciences which we have seen come forth in the world there was somewhere a now almost forgotten maiden aunt who furnished the extra ammunition needed for winning the decisive battle on some early day in an obscure, eager, young person’s life.
But it isn’t necessary to be the aunt of talented children in order to enjoy an aunt’s life. That is simply one of the many possibilities. The good aunt always gives to any kind of nieces and nephews the something extra, the something unexpected, the something which comes from outside the limits of their habitual world. She is an aviator from another country who drops leaflets out of the sky. She does not intend to start a revolution, she only wants them to learn that there are other countries besides their own. She is the contradiction to the rhythm of their safe and cozy life which first awakens them so that their ears become aware of another rhythm, the rhythm of the unknown, the wandering and anarchical, the dangerous, the strange and wonderful rhythm of the world which exists outside of domesticity. She is the joker in the pack of cards which placed here or placed there can change the whole aspect of the game. She belongs to nobody and to everybody. She belongs now to one child, now to another, and the one whose turn it is to draw her wins.
This is the kind of aunt I rather hoped that I might be. I wanted to join the long line of the famous aunts of history: those individuals, sparkling and free, who left such treasures behind them—Jane Austen, Kate Greenaway, Louisa Alcott, Emily Dickinson, Robert Louis Stevenson’s chief of our aunts—and Samuel Butler’s Aunt Pontifex in The Way of All Flesh—aunts whose excellence in the role of aunthood is so richly shown in their lives and letters. Although my ambition was to be one of these maiden aunts of history I knew that I would be among the very last of the line. For it looks as if the virgin aunt would soon become an extinct type, since the withdrawal into spinsterhood after a heartbreak or in obedience to parents or, indeed, for any other reason, has become an archaic gesture.
Between the year of Tony’s birth and the year when I found my house five other new members of our family had made their appearance on the earth. They were my brother Warren’s and my sister’s children. They were Jonathan Glover, Harriet Hathaway, and Elizabeth Keats; and there was my sister’s exquisite little Ranie, and her Katharine, my namesake, who was the youngest newcomer at the time when I bought my house.
With this increasing number of nephews and nieces it was natural that I wanted to increase the scope of my aunthood. I wanted to put it in the right setting, on a grand scale. This called for a house of my own in the country. And so I dreamed my second wish for the life of my house, and it was a wish for the kind of eternal magic which a child sees and feels about a beloved place where he goes to visit in summer—a magic that will stay in his heart all his life long, and be a touchstone for all his life’s experience—the place for which he is likely to feel this is a place that is not home, although it is as familiar and easy as home. It will have a strangeness and a wonder about it that home can never have. It is a place of poignant return and poignant farewell. It is a place enthralled, that waits and sleeps all winter long and is awakened again at the beginning of summer when the first eager footsteps go running over its threshold.
I wanted my house to be something of this kind, which would create a tradition in the lives and memories of the new generation.